Permissions

Certain features in PSPDFKit need additional permissions, which will require modifications in your Info.plist file. Adding these descriptive keys has been a recommendation since iOS 7 and has been strongly enforced since iOS 10. When the system prompts the user to allow access for a certain subsystem, this value of the permission key will be displayed as part of the alert. From the Apple documentation:

Important: To protect user privacy, an iOS app linked on or after iOS 10.0, and which accesses TYPE, must statically declare the intent to do so. Include the KEY in your app’s Info.plist file and provide a purpose string for this key. If your app attempts to access TYPE without a corresponding purpose string, your app exits.

These rules are enforced statically at upload time in iTunes Connect. The static code analyzer can’t detect whether or not the code is being used, so the descriptions for NSCameraUsageDescription or NSMicrophoneUsageDescription need to be added when linked with PSPDFKit, even if you do not allow image or sound annotation creation. The description is not visible to the user; therefore, if you do not use this anywhere in your app, you can use something generic.

Microphone Permissions

If you do not set this, the application will crash with the following error log:

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[access] This app has crashed because it attempted to access privacy-sensitive data without a usage description. The app’s Info.plist must contain an NSMicrophoneUsageDescription key with a string value explaining to the user how the app uses this data.

To fix this, edit your Info.plist and assign a descriptive string to this key. PSPDFKit has been checking for this since 5.5.1 to warn you in advance if you forget. See our sample projects for examples of such descriptions.

Note: Audio Recording is not available in extension contexts, so this option will always be filtered out.

It is also recommended to add “audio” to the UIBackgroundModes key to allow sound recording in the background. See Apple QA1668 for more details.

App Store Considerations

Apple might request information about how it can test UIBackgroundModes — simply attach a sample PDF that contains sound to this request. The file provided here contains copyright-free sample music and can be used to test sound annotations. Just make sure you don’t accidentally disable sound annotations by excluding them from -[PSPDFDocument renderAnnotationTypes].

Browser Permissions

If you use WKWebView (e.g. via PSPDFWebViewController), you might want to set NSAllowsArbitraryLoadsInWebContent to YES to allow http links to be loaded and https pages that do not yet comply to Apple’s App Transport Security rules.

Putting It All Together

Your Info.plist file should have following entries:

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<key>UIBackgroundModes</key>
<array>
<string>audio</string>
</array>
<key>NSMicrophoneUsageDescription</key>
<string>Recording sound annotations requires the microphone.</string>
<key>NSCameraUsageDescription</key>
<string>Pictures captured with the camera can be added to the document as image annotations.</string>
<key>NSPhotoLibraryUsageDescription</key>
<string>Pictures from the photo library can be added to the document as image annotations.</string>
<key>NSPhotoLibraryAddUsageDescription</key>
<string>Images from documents and annotations can be saved to the photo library.</string>
<key>NSAllowsArbitraryLoadsInWebContent</key>
<true/>